On July 24th of last year, Rails 0.5 was released through RubyForge. It mustered 357 downloads in just five days. Today, fifteen releases later, we’ve pushed more than ten thousand gems and five thousand tgz/zip versions over the virtual counter. At the time of writing, the IRC channel holds 153 handles. We recently got Slashdotted and a ton of cool applications are coming out using Rails.

We’ve certainly come quite a long way in six months.

But its only going to get better. A lot better. Dave Thomas is writing the first book on Rails, the mystical 1.0 release is just 1-2 months away, and there’s a number of cool speaking engagements coming up at future conferences that’s going to push awareness even higher.

If you’re reading this, I salute you for being one of the early adopters (or at least interested) that has helped bring Rails this far. Happy half-birthday, Rails!